Some Trump supporters actually viewed him as the “peace candidate”, citing Hillary’s hawkishness on issues like Russian expansionism. But wars aren’t usually caused by hawkishness, they are caused by incompetence and mixed signals and recklessness. (The 1991 Gulf War is exhibit A.) Here’s an article discussing Tillerson’s recent threats aimed at China:

Beijing not happy. All this focus on Russia has in some respects clouded the comments that Tillerson made earlier in the week about the South China Sea. He told senators at his nomination hearing that Washington is “going to have to send China a clear signal that first, the island-building stops, and second, your access to those islands is also not going to be allowed.”

His answer amounted to more than just staking out a tough line on China. “It was a stunning break with years of American foreign policy,” reportsFP’s Emily Tamkin. “Tillerson’s warning that the United States would block China’s access to the contested islands shocked and bewildered lawmakers and their aides, and diplomats across Asia. If carried out, it could violate international law as Washington has interpreted it and could put the United States on a collision course with China, raising the danger of a military clash.”

Beijing has sure noticed. On Friday, the government-run the Global Times newspaper said Washington would have to “wage a large-scale war” in the South China Sea to prevent Chinese access to the islands.

Trump supporters will insist that he doesn’t mean it; he’s just using this as a negotiating tactic with China, as with the “two Chinas” remark. They may be right. But here’s what they don’t understand. Negotiating tactics are useless unless there is some probability that you carry through with your threats. If others discover that you are a paper tiger, your policy will be ineffective in the future. (That’s why Obama’s “red line” comment on Syria was his single biggest foreign policy error.) In foreign policy, ambiguity is a big mistake.

If Trump chooses to implement Nixon’s “madman theory” as a way intimidate other countries, it might work for a period of time. But not forever. (It did not work for Nixon.) Now think about the sort of circumstances where it stops working. And then think about Trump’s personal characteristics: his ego, poor judgment, vindictiveness, pride, impatience, ignorance of history, rashness, conspiracy theorizing.

Sumner Errors and Omissions: Sumner is married to an Oriental, can you say Manchurian Candidate? Nixon’s “Madman Theory” was a success, not a failure, and practiced by Putin too (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madman_theory). Being consistent with foreign policy is the hobgoblin of little minds, and the cause of being stuck in Vietnam. When the facts change, I change my mind, what do you do Sir? Thus Obama’s Syrian policy was noble in principle, but when it turned out the anti-ISIS factions fighting Assad were no different from ISIS, Obama had to retreat (and anyway many anti-Assad Syrians dislike these rebels more than they dislike Assad).

A bigger mistake than overthrowing Gaddafi? A bigger mistake than enabling Saudi Arabia and co. to destroy and starve Yemen? I don’t think it makes the top 5, and that’s because “credibility” is vastly overblown, at least according to international relations academics. Also, you’ll recall that after the UK Parliament rejected bombing Assad Obama finally decided he was so isolated on wanting to attack Syria that he needed Congressional cover which was not forthcoming because Americans revolted at joining yet another war in the Middle East. So his biggest mistake was to follow the Constitution (for a change)?

But even if you’re really into credibility in international relations you’ll recall that Putin was worried enough about a punitive bombing of Assad that he brokered the deal to remove the chemical weapons from Syria. From a non-proliferation perspective this was a much better outcome than what would have been achieved by the incredibly small bombing (nothing).

“Advocating a no-fly zone over Syria, which would require shooting down Russian planes, was reckless.”

Repeated three times during the election campaign.

However, as pointed out by Chomsky, ‘So the United States is telling the countries of the world: if you are defenceless, we are going to attack you when we want, but if you have a deterrent, we will back off, because we only attack defenceless targets. In other words, it is telling countries that they had better develop a terrorist network and weapons of mass destruction or some other credible deterrent; if not, they are vulnerable to “preventive war”.’https://chomsky.info/20030321/

“So his biggest mistake was to follow the Constitution (for a change)?”

I never said Obama should have gone to war in Syria. And I don’t have any big problem with Obama’s foreign policy.

David, Was that advocacy before or after Russia started bombing Syria?

In any case, I’d say Hillary is far less reckless than Trump, although she may have been wrong in that particular recommendation. Note that I don’t agree with Hillary on foreign policy (she is more hawkish than I am).

It’s absurd to think the Russians would’ve purposely violated a no fly zone. Doing so would’ve meant not only taking the US on on the air, but also Turkey, which is a NATO member. Russia had the clear goal of triangulating with Turkey against the US which, given US abdication of leadership, was easy to do.

Incorrect. The 1991 gulf war was in fact a result of hawkishness from the then dominant neocon establishment. Saddam wanted to use military force to stop Kuwait from drilling for oil underneath the Iraq border and into Iraq. The US military establishment, who wanted US presence in the middle east, told Saddam that sure, he can stop the Kuwaitis from doing this, and that there will be no intervention from the US to stop it. So Saddam did what he did, and then Bush and his cronies did an about face and used that very response to justify invading Iraq.

This was the plan. Invade the middle east, but create a story to justify it to the American people. Remember the “Saddam is killing babies in the hospitals”? Propaganda.

———-quote——–
“On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved, but it’s important for him to give me space,” Obama can be heard telling Medvedev, apparently referring to incoming Russian president — and outgoing prime minister — Vladi­mir Putin.

“Yeah, I understand,” Medvedev replies, according to an account relayed by an ABC News producer, who said she viewed a recording of the discussion made by a Russian camera crew. “I understand your message about space. Space for you . . .”

“This is my last election,” Obama interjects. “After my election, I have more flexibility.”

Medvedev, who last week demanded written proof that Russia is not the intended target of U.S. missile defense efforts, responded agreeably.

“I understand,” he told the U.S. president. “I will transmit this information to Vladimir.”

The exchange provided a rare glimpse of a world leader speaking frankly about the political realities he faces at home.
————–endquote————-

I disagree (strongly) with the general thrust of Scott’s post, but regarding the 1991 Gulf War, I think what Scott means is that there were allegations that a US ambassador told Saddam that Americans had no problem if he invaded Kuwait, and then they invaded because of it. Here is Patrick Cockburn alluding to the theory, and claiming that WikiLeaks later refuted it. But I think that’s what Scott was referring to.

(Now whether that’s the same thing as saying, “Trump will end up bombing Russia because right now he’s saying let’s try diplomacy and his compromising photos–the existence of which Matt Yglesias has established through ratiocination–will only restrain him for 6 months,” I leave as an exercise to the reader.)

Well, Tillerson (or whoever gets confirmed as SoS) will have a pretty low bar to overcome from the past eight years. Here’s John Kerry’ last attempt at self-justification;

————-quote————
QUESTION: Maybe it just earned me a follow-up. I want to return to this question of American standing abroad. And in particular, I want to return you to a pivotal moment in this presidency and in your tenure as Secretary of State. I refer to the whole sequence of events in 2013 when the President more than once very firmly declared a red line in Syria and then declined to enforce that red line. The famous photograph of you in the Situation Room seemed to telegraph your own incredulity at the whole turn of events.

You ask us to talk to people in the world. I’ve spoken to many of your counterparts throughout the Middle East who are among our allies, and even to heads of state. And far from overblowing these complaints, we haven’t even been allowed to report the severity of the complaints about that particular turn of events. They have told me that nothing they’ve seen in their careers has done more to damage U.S. standing and credibility around the world and – than the particular standing of this President than that failure to enforce his own red line. Should historians look back on this and identify it as a nadir of the modern presidency?

SECRETARY KERRY: No. No, because I don’t think that the press writ large, broadly, has actually properly analyzed, assessed, and reported on exactly what took place. So let me be very specific. It’s going to take me a minute, but I’m going to be very specific.

The President of the United States of America, Barack Obama, did decide to use force. And he announced his decision publicly and said we’re going to act, we’re going to do what we need to do to respond to this blatant violation of international law and of warnings and of the red line he had chosen.

Now, we were marching towards that time when, lo and behold, on a Thursday of a week before the Fridaydecision, Prime Minister David Cameron went to parliament – or he went on Wednesday. I forget which. Somewhere in the early part of the week, he went to the parliament and he sought a vote of approval for him to join in the action that we were going to engage in. And guess what? The parliament voted no. They shot him down.

So as we were briefing Congress, and I was on one of those briefing calls with maybe a hundred members of Congress on the call, many of them were saying, “Well, you’re going to come to us. You’re going to go through the Constitutional process, get permission from us to do something.” And the President had already decided to use force, but then the question became, “Do I need to go to Congress to get that permission?” There was a big debate in the security group. I was part of that. I remember the debate. And we felt that we’d quickly get Congress’s approval because this was such a blatant violation.

And the President decided – I got a call Friday night, we met Saturday morning, and the President decided that he needed to go to Congress because of what had happened in Great Britain and because he needed the approval, and that was the way we do something like that. It wasn’t forthcoming very rapidly, number one. But number two, in the – the President never said, “I don’t want to bomb.” He never said, “I’m not going to.” He went to Congress to get permission to.

And in the meantime, at a press conference in London – you may have been there – I was asked the question, “Is there anything that Assad could do in order to avoid being bombed?” And I said, “Yes. He could agree to get rid of his weapons.” And within an hour, an hour and a half, I got a phone call from Sergey Lavrov of Russia suggesting that was a really good idea, why don’t we work on whether or not we could do that? And President Obama and President Putin had actually talked about it a few weeks earlier in St. Petersburg, and I’d already talked to Lavrov – I’d actually talked to Prime Minister Netanyahu about it, who thought it was a good idea.

And so all of a sudden, Lavrov and I were thrown together by our presidents in an effort to try to achieve that. And guess what? We did achieve it before Congress voted. The President never said, “I won’t drop a bomb.” What happened was people interpreted it. The perception was that he was trying to find a different road. And I will acknowledge to you, absolutely, I heard it all over the place. The perception hurt, yes. The perception hurt, but the perception came about despite the fact that we actually got a far better result of getting all of the weapons of mass destruction of Syria without dropping a bomb. And if we had dropped a bomb, there is no guarantee we would have gotten any of them out.

QUESTION: Is Syria today a better result, sir?

SECRETARY KERRY: No, obviously Syria is – it has nothing to do with that. What is happening today in Syria has nothing to do with the dropping or not dropping. It has everything to do with whether or not Assad was ready and willing to be held accountable by Russia and Iran to actually live by the agreements that they offered, and also whether or not the opposition was able to act in a way that could create enough leverage for Assad to have to come to the table and negotiate. And obviously, when Putin went in and put his troops on the ground to support – and his airplanes in the air to support Assad, that whole ballgame changed. We acknowledge that.

But the fact is that it wasn’t that decision. It was a whole bunch of other things that may have affected that.

The bottom line is, folks, the President never retracted his intent to – he just got rid of the need to do it by embracing a different approach that got all the weapons out. And so yes, I have to acknowledge – I can’t – he would acknowledge the perception certainly is out there. But I don’t think it’s fair, because I don’t think it actually reflected the decisions that he made, and it doesn’t reflect the reality of what we were able to achieve.

On that note, thank you all
————-endquote————-

Oh, btw, we did win the Vietnam War. It was the peace–established by Nixon–that we lost. Had Nixon not resigned, South Vietnam might very well have been able to defend itself successfully from the North’s offensive in 1975. Just as it did in 1972 (without any American ground troops to assist it).

Scott: Why do you even let people like Ray Lopez and Major.Freedom comment here? Their only contribution is making racist or stupid comments.

Agree that in order for madman theory to work you eventually have to do something crazy to convince your opponents you are in fact mad. Maybe Trump will nuke the Iranian desert or something to prove his point. That seems to be the least possible harmful thing he could to do obtain credibility. Not exactly looking forward to it.

If we’re going to demarcate wars into “hawkish” on the one hand and [fill in the blank] on the other, such as “incompetence and mixed signals”, then I don’t think it makes any sense to say that the Bush 1 admin’s war was of the latter and not the former type. They were hawks if their ever was a hawkish admin.

Tillerson’s comments are but a tempest in a teapot. Consider that the United States sails the Seventh Fleet, bristling with nuclear weapons, up and down the coast of China, a nation that poses no military threat to us.

BTW, surface vessels are easily sunk.

The U.S. maintains airbases throughout the Pacific, including forward in Korea and Japan.

I happen to think current China political leadership is embarrassingly backward and primitive. But then, so is the current military posture of the United States.

“But here’s what they don’t understand. Negotiating tactics are useless unless there is some probability that you carry through with your threats. If others discover that you are a paper tiger, your policy will be ineffective in the future. (That’s why Obama’s “red line” comment on Syria was his single biggest foreign policy error.) In foreign policy, ambiguity is a big mistake.”

-Like every single thing Sumner says on foreign policy, this is moronic. Studies have tested this hypothesis, and they have rejected it soundly:

Scott’s honed instincts about credibility and expectations serve him well when it comes to his comments on foreign policy. He’s quite correct about the importance of setting clear expectations.

In this sense, successful foreign policy is like good driving. A good driver usually makes intentions clear. Surprises usually increase the chance of accidents.

Trump is like a drunk driver. He swerves all over the road, runs red light, makes left turns out of the lane right of the left turn lane, etc. His chances of a crash are much higher than with any other developed country chief executive I’ve seen. Yet, like many drunks, he thinks he’s a fine driver.

This is very confusing. The court of arbitration in The Hague just ruled China’s island building and subsequent territorial claims to those artificial islands illegitimate. Why are lawmakers bewildered that Tillerson called China’s actions out as illegal?

————-quote————
One of the first things most Americans are likely to find is that they’ll have more choices when it comes to buying insurance. You may have to pay more for insurance that covers some providers and conditions, but you’ll also be able to buy cheaper, less-comprehensive insurance if you want to.

ObamaCare required all insurance to cover a wide-ranging — and expensive — “essential benefits package.” Repeal will mean more of an a la carte approach to insurance, based on individual consumer preference.

In fact, this is likely to be one of the first changes to ObamaCare. While the law requires that there be an essential-benefits package, it gives the president a great deal of discretion in determining what that package should be. President Trump can take action by executive order to repeal some of the requirements that President Obama included.

People will even have the choice not to buy insurance at all, since the much-reviled individual mandate will be gone. Going without insurance may not necessarily be a wise choice, but it does re-establish a fundamental limit to state power over the individual. And it allows young and healthy people to purchase low-cost catastrophic coverage that makes much more sense for them.

Most people will find more choice to be a good thing, but there’s a downside. If people opt out of services that they won’t use — such as men choosing not to buy maternity coverage — it will drive up the price for those who do use those services.

Consumers won’t just find more options in the types of plans; there should also be more insurers to choose from. Recently, insurers have been abandoning ObamaCare exchanges in droves. Roughly a third of US counties have only one insurer participating in their exchange. Repeal will lure insurers back into the market.

Finally, a replacement plan will almost certainly let you shop for insurance out of state.
———-endquote————-

I agree that we don’t want to go to war over the island building and I assume that the US is not without sin in international affairs, but I’m not sure what is the best way to avoid conflict long term in the South China Sea. If we continue ignoring the island building and make no effort to support international rulings will China just become more aggressive in their claims. Is it wise for us to acquiesce to the Chinese opinion that the South China Sea is a Chinese lake? Perhaps we should just look at it as their Caribbean.

I do know that China is the aggressor in this island building business. Duterte may not care about it, but it was his country that brought the issue to the court of arbitration. Vietnam certainly cares and they have fought skirmishes over it with China. And Japan, Indonesia and Australia would all much prefer the sea remain international waters. And the Indian Navy hasn’t appreciated being threatened in international waters when traversing it.

E Harding, please don’t attribute fightin’ words to me that I never said.

Scott, two things:

1) The most belligerent thing I’ve written on you talking about Trump is this recent post; presumably that’s the basis of E Harding’s remark.

2) Aren’t we saying the same thing about Iraq? I thought your point was that the Bush Administration didn’t give Saddam a clear warning that he shouldn’t invade Kuwait, and so he misunderstood what the US reaction would be. And so that’s why you’re saying mixed signals are worse than hawkishness in terms of starting wars?

What a spirited statement. Who is talking about going to war? No one is. It’s about making clear that China’s actions are illegal and will not be tolerated. It’s really important to make a stand at this point. If you won’t do this countries like China will be encouraged to draw the line further and further.

It’s like with Putin and Georgia. No serious reaction? Fine let’s attack Ukraine. No serious reaction? Fine let’s go into Syria. What country will be next?

Or Hitler and the Sudetenland. No serious reaction? Fine let’s take Czechoslovakia. And then Poland. And then Western Europe. And then the world.

Patrick, Trump says people won’t be turned down for pre-existing conditions. The GOP health care train wreck is on the way–fasten your seatbelts.

Carl, You said:

“Perhaps we should just look at it as their Caribbean.”

Yes, that’s probably the lesser of evils.

Bob, I thought you were suggesting that I claimed we OKed the invasion. My point was that by saying something like “your dispute with Kuwait was no concern of ours”, we gave him a signal he misinterpreted. That’s pretty generally accepted, according to the Wikipedia entry.

————quote———
The only workable answer is to take otherwise uninsurable people out of the traditional insurance market altogether and subsidize their coverage separately.

This may be done through the expansion and subsidy of state high-risk pools, much the way states handle auto insurance for high-risk drivers. Or sick individuals may be taken out of the insurance system altogether, with their health care paid for through a reformed Medicaid program.

However these changes play out, it’s important to realize that no one is going to have their health insurance suddenly snatched away. Some people may have to get their health care in different ways, and some, who can afford it, may have to pay more.

But the predictions that replacing ObamaCare will mean uninsured Americans dropping dead in the street are worth little more than fake news.
————endquote———

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Welcome to a new blog on the endlessly perplexing problem of monetary policy. You’ll quickly notice that I am not a natural blogger, yet I feel compelled by recent events to give it a shot. Read more...

Bio

My name is Scott Sumner and I have taught economics at Bentley University for the past 27 years. I earned a BA in economics at Wisconsin and a PhD at Chicago. My research has been in the field of monetary economics, particularly the role of the gold standard in the Great Depression. I had just begun research on the relationship between cultural values and neoliberal reforms, when I got pulled back into monetary economics by the current crisis.